50g - overclock

[Claudio L.]

(05-26-2018 10:06 AM)Vtile Wrote:  C113, C119 results a crash/hang and C124S doesn't provide much speed benefit (if at all) for userRPL loop structure. C101 does corrupt at least momentarily something on the system as the softmenu and function keys doesn't match.. So not optimal outside of some obscure use case unfortunately.

The programs by Al Borowski were very early experiments with overclocking. The memory and other hardware clocks were going out of range sometimes and that causes instability in the form of random crashes, not exactly what you want when you need to run a long calculation.
HPGCC3 has a much more advanced clocking function (also inherited by newRPL) where you can choose any clock you want, and it programs all other hardware clocks and memory wait states accordingly so it can work at 192 MHz reliably and with a real speed benefit. The bad news is the 50g OS isn't necessarily ready to operate at any clock different from the stock 75 MHz, so even if you use a C program in hpgcc3 to change the clock, some things are expected to simply not work properly. For example, USB and SD card are immediately broken in turbo mode, even though their clocks are programmed correctly. But in some drivers the OS uses fixed loops for small delays, if you make those loops run twice as fast, they don't wait long enough for the hardware to respond and causes all kinds of errors.
If it had been so easy to make the 50g go faster, newRPL wouldn't exist, but the only real solution was to start from scratch.